Heavy Rain

Heavy Rain is not the typical game.  You don't collect coins, beat up guys or finish missions.  It calls itself an interactive drama and Quantic Dream are the pioneers to bascially a quck time event based adventure game. 
 
First off i will say i am a huge fan of QuanticDream, their first game of this genre, Indigo Prochecy (or Farenheit as it is called in Europe) was a real fresh and progressive take on the adventure series. Yet the story lacked a solid ending.  Heavy Rain builds on what they learned in Indigo Prochecy and makes every fault in the previous game better.   
 
Since this is an adventure game story is the main focus of the game and Heavy Rain delivers on a superb story.   Having 4 characters is a step up to the 3 (i think) characters in Indigo Prochecy and they all share a different perspective to the story but all revovle around the main point of the story which is the Oragami killer, a person that is running around town drowning young boys.  This is a very well made Thriller detective story which can rank themselves with the top movies in the movie industry but its definetely not the best story.  There were certain aspects which are told but not fleshed out.  But the story will leave you satisfied and it is defenitely one of the better if not most unique stories in the game industry.  Heavy Rain is essentially giving a movie with a chose your adventure type flair and the story truly succeeds in that the decisions you make in the game really hit the core values of you as a person.  There were certain things i did in the game which made me question what was the right thing to do. 
 
Making these decisions usually in the form of quick time events or walking around and interacting with the environment.  Interactiving with the environemnt worked but it definetely could have been built better.  Walking around the environment felt extremely clunky making the R2 button as the walk button.  I'm not sure what the design decision was for this (i think it was something along the lines of having feet actions to be R2 and L2) but it would have been much easier to traverse if it was just the analog stick.  Quick time events are an extremely big step for quantic dream from the simon says interface they had in Indigo (which usually blocked the screen leaving the player to not see much of the action).  Here it shows which buttons to press and how to press them in a very intuitive way showing the player exactly what to do while still being able to view the action.  The one complaint i do have is that the six axis moition actions sometimes don't trigger leading you to fail.  The biggest success Heavy Rain has in the controls/gameplay aspect is that they somehow made all the controller actions depict how you would move if you were put in the same situation.  For example when i had to ride a bike i would have to steer the bike by steering the controller much like a bike. (although since it was using the six axis control scheme some of my movements didn't comprehend leading me to fail, but there are many other situations which achieve this goal without using the six axis control, i don't want to get into spoiler territory). 
 
The graphics are good.  The atmosphere is set very well giving very dark colours to showcase a dark mood or bright colors to showcase a good mood.  The graphics are definitely a step up from Indigo but playing this after God of War 3 makes this game not look that great.  The characters faces look alright but many times i can tell that this is a game and when they start to do human like things (such as kissing) the game starts to show that it can't pass the uncanny valley and it looks really weird.  But the graphics never hindered my experience it just wasn't the best i've seen on the platform.  
 
the sound has its ups and downs.  The music works extremely well giving very grim music when needed a thumping a house track in a crowded nightclub.  The voice acting is a little shaky.  There were many cases where i could tell certain actors werent' american and their accent faltered, this can be heard the most in the child actors.  Since this is a huge Sony production, i figure getting american actors wouldn't have been hard. 
 
Heavy Rain has its bumps.  Sure the voice acting is weird, graphics look awkward at times and the control scheme is a little off but despite all of these things i still had an amazing experience.  The story started off slow and i was able to play couples hours in and stopped but once the story picks up it was hard to put the controller down.  I ended up continuing the game at the halfpoint at around 10:30 and finishing it at 5 am in the morning.    the game is about 10 hours long and the correct way to play it is to not restart due to wrong decisions (i didn't follow this rule cause at one point i did something i didn't wnat to do because i thought i was going to do one thing and ended up doing something totally different due to the vague understanding of how the control scheme worked) and play it once (from what i've heard playing it once keeps the story personal to you, playing the story several times kills the magic in how the story branching work).  Another note, when installing the game the first time they give you a piece of paper in the game box and  they instruct you on how to make the oragami on the cover.  Probably the best pastime when a game is installing.   Bottom line, if you have a Ps3 play this game at least once, i guarantee you its a great experience and one that will really test your beliefs.